(AP Photo/Molly Riley) Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal delivers the keynote address during Faith and Freedom Coalition's Road to Majority event in Washington, Saturday, June 21, 2014. UPDATE (September 1, 2014): A ruling issued on Sunday by a U.S. federal court has put on hold enforcement of the Louisiana law discussed in this commentary, which requires doctors who perform abortions to obtain admitting privileges to a hospital within 30 miles of the clinic at which they practice. Under the ruling, doctors are allowed to continue performing abortions while they seek the required privileges. I n 1973, abortion became a constitutionally protected right in the United States. But, judging from the repeated full-fledged attacks on Roe v. Wade and all the protections it provides, it's as if the anti-choice movement has been plugging their ears and singing, “La la la, I can’t hear you!” for the last forty-one years. Unfortunately, its members have proven themselves to be good at multitasking,...

As everyone knows, opinions on same-sex marriage have been changing rapidly, which also means that the positions of politicians have to change to keep up. Now that pretty much every Democrat running for anything is in favor of marriage equality, they're done changing. Republicans, on the other hand, are going to have to keep tweaking their stance, confronted by the almost impossible challenging of signaling their open-mindedness to general election voters while not alienating a conservative base that, for a while anyway, is still opposed to gay people getting married. So what's the answer to that problem? "Leave it to the states." Is that an admirable bit of live-and-let-live, let-a-hundred-flowers-bloom approach to governing, or is it a cowardly cop-out? It's kind of both. It wasn't too long ago that Republicans were advocating a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman. But few people in the GOP mainstream say that anymore. If you want to know where...

AP Photo/Justin Hayworth Campaign buttons are ready for distribution at an Iowa kickoff event for the national Ready for Hillary group led by Craig Smith, senior adviser to the Ready for Hillary group, in Des Moines, Iowa, Saturday, Jan. 25, 2014. Ready for Hillary is a so-called super PAC building a national network to benefit Clinton if she decides to seek the presidency in 2016. The gathering of Iowa Democrats included the state chairs of both Clinton and President Barack Obama's 2008 campaigns. A s a reporter and columnist for Time , Newsweek , the Washington Post , USA Today , Esquire , Salon , and other publications, Walter Shapiro has covered nine presidential elections and the nation’s politics for four decades. He is currently a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University and a lecturer in political science at Yale while he finishes a book about his great-uncle, a vaudevillian and con man who once swindled Hitler. Shapiro is also an accomplished Hillary-...

M r. Brown folded his large hands and gleamed at me with a placid smile. Then, suddenly, he said, “You have to work!“ His tone was that of a father scolding an errant teenager. “If we give you money, you have to work!” I managed the seething anger brought on by this exchange, and compounded by the hunger I felt after having waited a few hours for my turn at this encounter, not to mention the set of events that led up to me applying for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Plan (SNAP, a.k.a. food stamps) and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). “I have a job,” I managed to say, “it’s part-time and I’m actively looking for a full time job.” I pointed to the printed e-mails of interview appointments, job applications and cover letters. He waved away my evidence and continued down his checklist. I could tell that he gave this speech regularly and had no interest in a rebuttal. I slumped down in the chair, defeated, feeling solidarity with the woman who was escorted out of the...

AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta) U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Alito Jr., delivers his remarks during a Federalist Society dinner gathering, Thursday, Nov. 16, 2006, in Washington. This article originally appeared at The Huffington Post . S upreme Court Justice Samuel Alito ended this Supreme Court session with a bang, writing the majority opinion in two cases that gave for-profit corporations the right to make religious liberty claims to evade government regulation, and set the stage for the fulfillment of a central goal of the right-wing political movement: the destruction of public employee unions. Neither of the decisions was particularly surprising. Samuel Alito is the single most pro-corporate Justice on the most pro-business Court since the New Deal. Still, Alito's one-two punch was another extraordinary milestone for the strategists who have been working for the past 40 years to put business firmly in the driver's seat of American politics. Many would suggest that...

Yesterday, in a post about the political implications of the Hobby Lobby case, I said: "Though I haven't seen any poll that released breakouts by demographics, I'll bet that the populations that support this decision are the ones firmly in the Republican camp already, particularly older white evangelicals." As someone helpfully alerted me on Twitter, there is such a poll, from the Kaiser Family Foundation , taken in April. And while they didn't ask about religious affiliation, it turns out that age shows the starkest differences other than party identification in how people view the contraception issue. Let's look at some numbers, then we'll discuss what they might mean. Kaiser asked the question two ways: first in a simple way, and then by giving a bit more information about each side's perspective. The first question was, "In general, do you support or oppose the health care law's requirement that private health insurance plans cover the full cost of birth control?" When presented...

Harold Meyerson, The American Prospect 's editor at large, appeared on the June 30th edition of Public Radio International's To the Point , analyzing the Supreme Court decision in Harris v. Quinn , which allows home health-care workers in Illinois to opt out of paying their union dues. Listen here . Read Meyerson's essay on the Harris case here: Supreme Court Rules Disadvantaged Workers Should Be Disadvantaged Some More

DVA.gov The United States Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C. T he conservative majority on the Supreme Court today took up the case of some of America’s most disadvantaged workers, and ruled that they should be disadvantaged some more. The five-to-four ruling in Harris v. Quinn goes a long way to crippling the efforts that unions have made to help these workers get out of poverty. The case concerned some 28,000 home care aides in Illinois whose paychecks come from Medicaid. Before the state agreed in 2003 that they could form a union, they made the minimum wage. (It’s the state that sets their wage rate, since their pay comes entirely from Medicaid.) Currently, as a result of their union contract, they make $11.85 an hour rather than the minimum of $7.25. Tomorrow, by the terms of their contract, their hourly rate is raised to $12.25, and on December 1 st to $13. The right to hire and fire these workers remains solely, of course, that of their home-bound patients and their...

Today, in McCullen v. Coakley , the Supreme Court struck down a Massachusetts statute that created a "buffer zone" enabling women to access reproductive health clinics without interference. As with the ruling on the EPA and Greenhouse gases from earlier in the week, however, the decision could have been much worse. While the Court held that the Massachusetts law was not consistent with the First Amendment, it did so in a way that should allow states to protect women who seek reproductive health care from having their clinic access blocked or impeded by protesters. There is no question that the 35-foot buffer zone around clinics created by the statute restricts speech. This does not, however, necessarily mean that a buffer zone violates the First Amendment. The state can restrict speech using "space, time, and manner" restrictions. (You have the right to express your political views, but do not necessarily have the right to express them through a megaphone in a residential neighborhood...

Shutterstock If there’s any one topic deemed a women’s issue that’s dominated the news in recent months, it’s that of sexual assault on campus. Time magazine did a cover story . Columnist George Will pronounced the label of rape victim to be a coveted status. And Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri just this week convened a roundtable discussion of stakeholders, including campus security officials, for input to a legislative remedy. The attention to the issue reached a crescendo in April when the White House released Not Alone , the report from its Task Force to Protect Students From Sexual Assault. As part of my work as a radio producer, I interviewed White House Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett , who sits on the task force. With that in mind, a colleague asked me to come by his office to show me a video. Now, politically, we are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Total opposites. But professionally and personally I consider him a friend. Looking at the relationships in Congress and...

Pride revelers often laud the role played by trans activist Sylvia Rivera in the Stonewall riots, a turning point in the fight for LGBT rights. But after the parade, trans people are forgotten—or worse.

Valerie Shaff/Sylvia Rivera Law Project The late trans rights activist Sylvia Rivera, a veteran of the 1969 Stonewall riots. Image courtesy of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project . T his week marks the anniversary of the Stonewall riots that inaugurated the modern gay rights movement in the United States, one that will be celebrated this weekend with Pride events in New York City and San Francisco. They feature transgender celebrities Laverne Cox and Janet Mock as grand marshals in the two respective cities, with other LGBT luminaries joining the festivities. The symbolic inclusion of these transgender women is an attempt by Pride organizers in both cities to signal trans inclusion as part of Pride's present. Yet Pride—once known as Gay Pride—has long been a time of paradox as much as celebration, a time when the advances of the mainstream gay rights struggle muffles a more complicated history, one that from its origins has involved transgender people. It's a well-worn story that trans...

Illustration by Steve Brodner W hen did Hillary Clinton become cool? Was it during her globe-trotting as secretary of state in caftans or with her hair pulled back in an ironically hip scrunchie? Was it when she traded funny letters with the actor Jason Segel? Or when she starred in her own Tumblr meme ? Whenever her ascent began, it reached a peak in March, when GQ published an interview with musician Pharrell Williams . In one of the most convoluted sentences ever recorded in the English language, he not only endorsed Clinton for president in 2016 but also predicted her win, one that would usher in purple-tinted national unity and a worldwide pro-choice matriarchy: “When we are a country and we are a species that has had a Martian Rover traveling up and down the crevices of this planet looking for water and ice, okay, and we’ve had a space station that’s been orbiting our planet for sixteen years—but we still got legislation trying to tell women what to do with their bodies? Hillary...

AP Photo/Chuck Burton In this May 6, 2014, photo Thom Tillis speaks to supporters at a election night rally in Charlotte, N.C., after winning the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate Tuesday, May 6, 2014. D ear Thom: I hope I can call you Thom; you may certainly call me Cynthia. Given the circumstances—given how far the policies you've supported since becoming Speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives have reached into my home and even my vagina —I feel we are on intimate terms that make surnames superfluous. In your 2012 comments to Carolina Business Review , unearthed by TPM last week, you talked about how Republicans need to reach out to communities of color, the type of GOP hand-wringing we've heard since Mitt Romney went down in flames. I believe your specific comment was this: The traditional population of North Carolina and the United States is more or less stable. It’s not growing. The African American population is roughly growing but the Hispanic population...